United 93 (Universal) A suggestion to those who’ve put off watching the year’s most wrenching and essential film: Before rolling the feature, first watch the documentary in which the families of those who died on the plane give the filmmakers their blessing, without reservation. If the mother, father, and sister…
The Abbott and Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection, Season One (Passport) Ace Ventura Deluxe Double Feature (Warner Bros.) Amarcord: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Anne of Avonlea (Koch Vision) Blade Runner: Director’s Cut (Warner Bros.) Broken Trail (Sony) Clive Barker’s The Plague (Sony) Commander in Chief: 2-Disc Inaugural Edition Part 2…
About 400 expert tango dancers will dance the day into night this evening as the sun sets on the Cheesman Park pavilion. And while tango may not be as popular in Denver as its cousin, salsa, it’s worth getting a peek at the classy steps as the seventh annual Labor…
The Taste of Colorado may celebrate its 24th anniversary this year, but the Festival of Mountain and Plain originated in 1895, when Denver’s Chamber of Commerce conceptualized the Festival to raise morale after a silver shortage. The carnival-style celebration included a parade, a masquerade ball, fireworks from the D&F Tower…
Beginning in 1993, Avenue Theater owners Dave Johnson and Bob Wells starred in a news-based comedy program heard weekends on Clear Channel-owned KHOW radio. But in 1998, “we got fired,” Johnson says, “because Clear Channel realized they could make more money off of people selling stuff than by producing their…
You probably won’t spot Bob Beauprez’s running mate, Janet Rowland, at the twentieth annual Meeker Classic Sheepdog Championship Trials. After all, ever since Rowland blurted out that blessing gay marriage might lead to “a man marrying a sheep,” it’s been obvious that she’s got a serious case of the sheepy…
If, at this remove, we can imagine Vienna in the late 1890s, we behold a great imperial capital in ferment. Gustav Mahler is not only reinventing the harmonic structure of serious music, but he is getting his head seriously shrunk by Sigmund Freud. Arnold Schoenberg takes painting lessons from the…
By the time Trust the Man opens this weekend, it will have been nearly a year since it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was picked up for distribution by Fox Searchlight. Forget that it’s a year old; this thing tastes a good decade past its expiration…
After declining an invitation to “embed” with a U.S. Army unit in Iraq, film director Deborah Scranton went the military one better by supplying Sony miniDV video cameras to members of Charlie Company, 3rd of the 172nd Infantry (Mountain) Regiment. The result is the most compelling Iraq documentary to date…
August is typically a dead time in the Denver art world, so the Denver Art Dealers Association came up with DADA INTRODUCTIONS, a way for members to present shows by artists whose work has not previously been shown in town. Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788) is just about the…
Colorado Modernism: 1930-1970. Though some believe that Colorado art doesn’t stand up to scrutiny because it’s so far behind the times, they’re wrong. Take modernist abstraction, for example: Local artists, especially those in Colorado Springs, were working in styles such as cubo-regionalism, surrealism and abstract expressionism as early as artists…
Making theater where there has been little or no theater before — the small towns east of Boulder, for example — is an exemplary activity, and finding new plays to produce is doubly so. But the process is also highly risky. It takes thousands of scripts that are so-so, spotty,…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
Have you ever looked into onrushing traffic and imagined how much damage you would cause with a simple crank of the steering wheel? If so, FlatOut 2 is the racing game for you. The latest entry in a genre best described as Evel Knievel meets NASCAR, FlatOut 2 lets you…
Arrested Development: Season Three (Fox) The final collection of Arrested Development discs feels sadly incomplete: only 13 episodes this time, the result of Fox’s inability to attract viewers to one of TV’s greatest comedies and the network’s unwillingness to give it a full farewell. But none of that diminishes the…
Akeelah and the Bee (Lions Gate) American Gun (IFC) The Castle of Cagliostro (Manga) Desperate Housewives: Season Two (Buena Vista) Stephen King’s Desperation (Lions Gate) Friends With Money (Sony) Iron Island (Kino) Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (Paramount) Lonesome Jim (IFC) Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros.)…
Gridlock jockeys along I-25 will be treated to a curious sight this afternoon: flying motorcycles. It’s part of Cyclefest, aka the Fay Myers Suzuki Supermoto Classic, a high-speed hybrid of motorcycle off-roading and road racing that’s taking over the parking lot at Invesco Field. “We’ve created a pretty fast track,”…
Short of Colfax and the Broncos, there’s nothing in this town that people are as passionate about as the Civic Center. And their hackles are up right now as they wait for Daniel Libeskind to reveal his preliminary designs for the hundred-year-old park, which the Civic Center Conservancy paid him…
Ever since the days of prehistoric man, words have been bandied about over broken bread, with the cave-dweller’s friendly “Ugh” slowly giving way to talk of love, current affairs, politics or simply what we did today. If you’ve ever had a hankering to bring something new to the table —…
“This festival is a gift to Swallow Hill,” says veteran musician and eminence grise Harry Tuft about the three-day Swallow Hill Folk Festival, which concludes today. “The services of the local performers are donated, and that allows money that’s raised to go directly to Swallow Hill.” This annual act of…
When collector/show promoter Dana Cain brought Denver the Baby Boomerama back in the ’90s, what she really wanted to celebrate was the retro spirit — that innocent belief in a bright, shiny future — in all its rich, expansive, pioneering entirety. But rather than produce an expo that waded knee-deep…
Climbing up the stairs to Club Evolution, 2300 Champa Street, is a little creepy, as if the Ghosts of Debauchery Past are going to appear from thin air to haunt me. Over yonder, in the corner, is where my best friend Senzelle met her future husband, who sat there writing…
